Chapter Text
When Tsukishima had planned to take on a side job and earn some money for a trip around the world after uni, this was not what he'd had in mind.
There were many jobs Tsukishima would have genuinely liked to do. But he had been too slow to apply at the library and at the museum and at the movie theater and somehow he had gotten himself in the situation where he had to call himself lucky to even get this shitty job.
He glared at the cold dead eyes of the salmon he was currently wrapping up in a plastic sheet. The fish had somehow managed to bite him three times today, despite being dead, and Tsukishima was honestly sick of cutting his hands on sharp fins and claws and whatever other unnatural anatomy these deep sea creatures liked to grow. It was truly sad because Tsukishima had liked fish before this job. He thought they were interesting and beautiful. By the sixth time the salmon had slipped out of his hands and almost slapped a customer in the face, however, Tsukishima had realized that fish were awful, mean creatures that held only ill will, even in their deaths. Wasn't it bad enough that he had somehow ended up in the foods section of the only department store their small town had to offer? They could have at least offered him a job in electronics or the book store – at least then he wouldn't be crammed away in the basement with no windows and a variety of bad smells all around. But no, instead he was planted at the very source of the bad smell, despite his sensitive nose and sensitive stomach. Seriously – the next customer who asked him to gut their fish for them would make acquaintance with his face-slapping salmon.
His brooding face must have attracted Terushima from Cheese, because in his peripheral vision he saw a mop of blond hair closing in. Sure enough, when he looked up, Terushima was leaning against the display window of his little counter, smirking at him.
“What's up, new guy? You seem to be a little behind.”
Tsukishima looked around and noticed that most of the other sections had already closed up for the evening. Shirofuku from the bakery was on her favorite part of cleaning up, which was eating all of the leftover fancy cakes out of the freezer cabinet. Aone from the butchery was just loading the last pound of minced meat onto his cart, ready to roll it over to the freezer. Everybody else had already left for the evening, even though it was common knowledge that you were not allowed to leave until everyone was done. Tsukishima had barely even begun yet. The fish section always took the longest to clean up, because he had to decide which of the fish were too old to be sold the next day and throw them away, wrap the rest up in plastic sheets and put them in the freezer, melt all the ice off the selling space, throw away a huge trash bag filled with fish innards, and scrub, scrub, scrub every surface until the metal was shining. The boss was very strict about hygiene, especially in the fish section.
What he had managed to do until now, was... nothing, really. He had wrestled with a Humboldt squid for the past fifteen minutes and finally got it to stay in the metal container it belonged and right now he was fighting his next worst enemy, the slippery salmon. Why did everything here have to be so slippery? The ice, the fish – the smell and the outfit made it impossible enough to keep up an image of dignity, but with the danger of slipping on a stray gallbladder for nine hours straight, he had been reduced to a bumbling idiot rivaling Hinata. This really was a sad chapter of his life.
“Why are you just standing around, then?” he asked Terushima. “Get some rubber gloves out of the drawers and help me!”
“Nah, I don't think I will...” Terushima scrutinized his own fingernails to display his disinterest. “I was just wondering what happened to your cute partner today.”
“Michimiya is sick, so this is my first time cleaning up alone. Don't think I won't tell the boss if you all abandon me here!”
“See?” sighed Terushima. “This is why nobody likes you, new guy!”
“I couldn't care less, now are you gonna help me or not?”
“Not. Sorry, I'm not trying to be mean, it's just... I have a date tonight and I can't risk stinking of fish, you know? It's not very sexy,” he said with a wink, then he turned and strolled over to the exit.
“You already stink of cheese, you hypocrite!” Tsukishima yelled after him. “And that's a hundred times worse than fish!”
It wasn't, but after nine hours of being gnawed on by dead fish and trying not to slip in front of everyone, he was not on top of his game. He looked around for other people he could somehow get to help him, but Shirofuku was nowhere to be seen – she had most likely fallen into a food coma behind her counter. Aone still wasn't back from the freezers, so Tsukishima decided to move on to the second worst part of his cleaning routine. Someone else could wrestle the damn fish. Someone who didn't have to do it every day – then maybe they would see how well off they were in their own non-slippery, non-stinky sections. So really, Tsukishima was only being nice when he left this stuff for someone else.
He drained the sink underneath the space where they gutted the fish and took his glasses off so he didn't have to see any of the gruesome details while he dumped the contents of the filter into the huge trash bag where he had already dumped the too old fish. Bad fortune really crossed a line when it decided to not only give Tsukishima the worst job on Earth, but also installed the trashcans outside, on ground level, so that he had to go on a little Odyssey with a bag of fish guts every damn evening. At least with Michimiya it wasn't so bad – she was fast and funny and didn't have the same weak stomach as Tsukishima, so they were usually able to wrap this up quickly. Had she been here, they would have been finished right about now. Tsukishima started to realize that he was a huge failure.
“Bye, Kunimi!” he heard Shirofuku yell from a distance. Great – so another one was running away, conveniently overlooking the state the fish section was still in. Where had that asshole Kunimi been all this time? He was the supervisor today, so he couldn't just let people run off like that. Well, this just meant that he would be the one who had to help Tsukishima in the end, because he was in charge of closing everything up, so he couldn't leave before everything was done. It was his own fault for dozing off in his corner.
Tsukishima finally reached the elevators in the storage and wrestled his trash bag inside. He had to go up one level to reach the garbage dump in the backyard of the supermarket and it was a nice visualization of how this job put him on an even lower level than a whole garbage dump. Just... why hadn't he applied at the library sooner?
He grabbed his digital badge out of the back pockets of his jeans. Everything here was badge-operated – sometimes it made him feel like he was working for a high-security branch of the government, when in reality he was just taking fish innards to the garbage dump. The elevator doors were already closing behind him as he pressed the badge against the console. There was no beeping sound to confirm his authentication and when he pressed the button for ground level, nothing happened.
Of course the elevators had to be broken right this moment. That was just his luck. Well – for all he cared, the fish guts could rot in here until tomorrow and if his boss decided to yell at him, it would be a good reason to huff out and quit. That would make him feel a lot better.
He had every intention of leaving the trash bag right where it was as he pressed the button to open the elevator doors. The only problem was that they wouldn't budge an inch.
“Fuck, no. Don't do this to me!” Tsukishima cursed, pressing his badge against the console again and punching all of the buttons at once. This couldn't be happening. He may not be the nicest person on earth, but there was no way he had collected that much bad karma. “FUCK!” he yelled, pounding against the metal doors. “Can anybody hear me?”
Of course they couldn't, because everyone had already left and Kunimi had probably fallen asleep on the opposite side of the supermarket. Seemed like Tsukishima had no other choice than to find out what the alarm button on an elevator was good for.
When he pressed it, a loud honk rang through the building – that would definitely startle Kunimi out of his sleep, so he did it again and again, while simultaneously pounding on the door. After some time, he had to accept that Kunimi either had a really deep sleep or had simply left. Tsukishima screamed. There was no way he would spend the whole night in an enclosed space with a bag of fish guts while wearing the same stinky fish clothes he had worn all day. This just couldn't be real. He had to be dreaming.
He continued to press the alarm button, listening to the monotone honk while contemplating all of his choices in life, until the little loudspeaker on the console suddenly crackled and a voice spoke to him.
“Nekoma elevators – how may we help you?”
The voice didn't have any right to sound so bored – sure, sitting in a little cubicle late at night while answering phone calls wasn't a dream job either, but it was nothing compared to Tsukishima's situation.
“Well, for starters, you could get me out of here,” he spat.
“Hold on a second, I need to locate you first.” The loudspeaker crackled some more – Tsukishima wasn't sure if it was supposed to be a little tune and the quality was just abysmal enough to turn it into alien speak. Then the voice was suddenly back. “You're at Ukai department store?”
“You couldn't just ask me?”
“I'd rather interact with our technology,” said the voice and Tsukishima wondered how mean he must have sounded if this person would rather use the brand of technology that gave him this alien speak machine and a broken elevator. “One of our technicians is relatively close-by. It should take about twenty minutes.”
Great. So he was supposed to wait here for another twenty minutes, like a princess needing to be saved? A very smelly princess with a bag of fish guts as her animal companion. He should get in touch with Disney after this – if he could sell his story, he could finally quit this awful job.
“Alright,” he said. “Thank you. So what's your name?”
He'd rather spend the next twenty minutes making small talk with a bored cubicle camper over low-quality loudspeakers than with his bag of fish guts.
“Thank you for calling Nekoma elevators services. We hope we could be of help.”
That said, the crackling of the loudspeakers finally fell silent and Tsukishima found himself hissing, “Well fuck you too!”
This was it then. He was doomed to wait in this small box with nothing but a bag of fish guts as his companion. His phone was far from his reach – three more levels underground, where the employees’ change rooms were located, so he couldn’t even kill his time with some stupid game app. Frustration was gnawing at him worse than the cut-off salmon heads had earlier this day. Right now they were stuffed into his companion bag, probably laughing at him with their dull, dead fish eyes suddenly twinkling.
Books and movies really had fucked up his expectations. Wasn’t it supposed to be an adventure to get stuck in an elevator? It was probably a good thing he wasn’t in some sort of horror movie scenario where the elevator was moving with his lower half sticking out of the doors, but still… Usually, people got stuck with the love of their lives and it culminated in a big confession scene. Or they would meet a mysterious and attractive stranger this way. This however – he wasn’t sure what this was supposed to be. A tragicomedy maybe. He squinted at his trash bag until he started to see a face in the folding. If he squinted even harder, it looked kind of attractive…
“GET ME OUT OF HERE ALREADY!” he yelled to no one in particular, banging his head back against the wall. As if on cue, the elevator suddenly started moving and for a moment he asked himself if he had inadvertently repaired it with violence. When the doors opened, however, his tragicomedy suddenly drove the plot forward by introducing a new character. The same character that might as well have been the mysterious, attractive stranger he would have been stuck with, had all of this been a romantic comedy. Sadly, it wasn’t. It was still the same story as it was when he started to see a face in his bag of fish guts – except now, he suddenly was the bag. His hair was greasy – hell, his whole person was greasy. He stunk worse than Nineteenth century Paris. The bags under his eyes mimicked the one still lying next to him on the elevator floor – it had started leaking at some point and planted some well-placed pieces of fish gunk on Tsukishima’s ass. Now that he thought about it, maybe he was an even less winsome choice than the gut bag, because at least it had a handsome face.
“Wow,” said the stranger, clearly holding his breath. “This was really not what I expected to find.”
“Well, I’m sorry. You took so long that I seem to have started to decay,” Tsukishima spat. There was no point in being nice and flirty with the stranger anyway – starting with the fact that Tsukishima didn’t know how to do nice and flirty and ending with the fact that he’d rather the stranger disliked him for his personality than for his state of indignity.
“Is that…” The stranger leaned a bit closer into the elevator light – the rest of the building was already dark, seeing as it was long past closing time. “Is that a fin sticking out of your hair? Dude – what the fuck happened to you?”
“I’m a reverse mermaid,” said Tsukishima, fumbling for the stray piece of fin. “My upper body starts growing fish anatomy when I get too fed up with the world to stand being human.”
“That sounds nothing like a reverse mermaid. I mean, I’m not entirely sure what a reverse mermaid would be, but…” At this point, the stranger couldn’t help but break into laughter. He had undoubtedly held it in ever since the elevator doors opened and it washed over Tsukishima like a wave – partly because it was salty and left him breathless (with anger) and also partly because it was really beautiful, as far as a donkey’s bray could be considered beautiful. Tsukishima started to suspect that he thought of himself so lowly that he lifted this guy to a level he wasn’t actually at. For starters, he had an outrageous hairstyle that was only slightly better than Tsukishima’s greasy fin-sprinkled one. He also wore a red overall, which was about five sizes too big, the sides flopping down in ugly folds. Wouldn’t this be considered a safety hazard for an elevator technician? If the slack fabric got caught in the doors, his horror film scenario might just become a reality.
Tsukishima decided to gracefully ignore the braying laughter and eyed the technician’s overall with a condescending look. “Lost a lot of weight lately, did you?”
The technician wiped a piece of snot that had escaped from his laughter on his sleeve. Gross. “They didn’t-,“ he was still heavily chuckling and Tsukishima could already see a hiccup coming. “They didn’t have my size. Elevator technicians aren’t usually fit young men like me.”
True – and yet the only fit young elevator technician in town had to be the one to free him from this almost literal sardine can. Tsukishima found himself wishing the genre would change from a tragicomedy to horror after all. At least then it would be this unreasonably attractive asshole that got himself killed while Tsukishima, as the suffering loner, would definitely survive.
“So, what’s your name then? I’m Kuroo.”
“Tsukishima…” said Tsukishima, if only so Kuroo wouldn’t get any weird ideas and start calling him Ariel or something equally stupid.
Kuroo grinned at him. He obviously didn’t need any nicknames to be an asshole. “Tell me, Tsukishima – did you sense that I was here or do you just like screaming to yourself?”
“You heard me?” Tsukishima tried hard not to look embarrassed by that, but he probably failed miserably. Looking like he had been swallowed and shat out by a whale apparently wasn’t a big enough blow to his dignity yet.
“Of course. Sound travels well in an elevator shaft.”
“I know that, since I obviously heard you.”
“Obviously,” drawled Kuroo. “Well, in any case – you’re free to go. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“Actually…” Tsukishima said, thinking hard. He was on ground level now. The dumpster was right around the corner. As much as he would have liked to quit this stupid job and walk out, leaving all the fish to rot over night, he was not entirely ready to give up on his dream of travelling the world, so he might as well finish cleaning up, have a night of awful sleep, come back to work tomorrow and slap Terushima and Kunimi with his face-slapping salmon. Besides, all his possessions, including his front door key, warm winter jacket and phone were still 4 levels underground, waiting for him to finish work and change into a less smelly change of clothes. Honestly, he mostly did it for the phone. He really needed to explode stuff with some angry birds right now. “You know what? I’ll just dump this trash bag around the corner and then you can drive me back down.”
“Whatever you say, fish-guy.”
And that’s how Tsukishima ended up worsening his situation by about three hundred percent.